Friday morning, the Neuse River was half a foot over flood stage. By Wednesday, it’ll be more than 2 feet over. As the forecast is for the river to drop throughout the day Wednesday, there’s no serious concerns — as of yet.

“Since the city and the county has done all that mitigation, where we bought up property and relocated people out of the floodplain — now we’ve got it at a point to where until it starts getting to about 21 feet — we really don’t see the effects of it unless it’s something like the (Neuseway Nature Park) campground, where campers are going to have to come out,” Lenoir County Emergency Services Director Roger Dail said.

Flood stage for the Neuse is 14 feet, so the 16.1-foot crest expected Wednesday morning isn’t said to be of top concern for property owners. But officials at the Neuseway Nature Park are ready to move people from the campground area.

“Well, we’ve already forewarned all the campers that the river will be exceeding the banks by possibly Monday,” said Bobby Cox, Neuseway naturalist director. “So, we’re ordering a mandatory evacuation for Monday morning, and then we’re pretty much going to seal off the campground and not let anyone in until the waters recede.

“We’re not expecting it to get up to our picnic shelter or up to our buildings — it’s just going to be lowland flooding in the campground.”

Part of the reason the river’s rising now is from local runoff from heavy rain, and from continuing storms to the west. Kinston’s being kept out of the rainstorm — stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes — by a high pressure zone off the coast.

“There’s a high centered just west of Bermuda, and it has nosed its way along the East Coast, and that has brought some dryer air, and some very warm air aloft, and limiting the amount of thunderstorm activity,” said Brian Edwards, meteorologist with Accuweather.com.

While property near the river may not be in danger, recent rain has made an impact on crops.

“The field crops, when you have a lot of water — as far as standing water — you can have your crops drown,” said Walter Adams, agriculture and natural resources technician with the Lenoir County Cooperative Extension. “That would be the first thing. The second thing would be the excess rain leeches the nutrients out of the soil, where the plant does not have any nutrients to take in.

“It moves it down further into the soil, where the roots cannot get hold of it.”

Adams said the main victims can be soybeans and cotton, in fields where a depression in the ground could cause water to pool and drown the crops. But, he said, time will tell on those crops, corn and tobacco as to whether there was a lack of nutrients in the soil when the plants needed them.

Page 2 of 2 - Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 and Wes.Wolfe@Kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @WolfeReports.